When it subsided, Coach Britt motioned toward the mike, but Sooley quickly begged off. The idea of making a speech terrified him.
There was a break in the action as they waited for the Selection. At four, the crowd grew quiet and the players took their seats on the stage. CBS and its A team began by announcing the first four national seeds: Duke, Gonzaga, Villanova, and Kansas. Then the First Four: Cornell would play-in against UMass; DePaul would play-in against Iowa State; BYU would play-in against Creighton.
And Florida would play-in against the Eagles of North Carolina Central, a 16th seed. The crowd roared with delight. The players jumped up with high fives and celebrated for the cameras. The coaches bear-hugged each other as if a quick trip to Dayton, followed by a game with Duke, was just exactly what they had in mind. With a big smile, Lonnie looked at Jason Grinnell and said, “What the hell?”
Jason, smiling, said, “No respect, man, no respect.”
Coach Ron McCoy quipped, with a smile, “We’re so screwed!”
The celebration eventually died down as the team and its fans watched the rest of the Selection. The coaches managed to keep smiling and feigning excitement, but they felt as though they had been shafted. There was little time for a practice. They knew nothing about Florida, except that they had beaten Kansas in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge, and had beaten Kentucky in Rupp Arena in early January. In an up-and-down season, they had won 22, lost 12, split their conference games, then almost beaten Auburn in the tournament final.
Lonnie left the stage and huddled with the AD. Travel plans had to be expedited. A private air charter would be needed, though it was certainly not in their budget. Other details were vague.
They agreed that they got a raw deal, but they had made it to the Big Dance, barely, and it was important to seize the moment. The assistant coaches were on their phones calling other coaches, scouts, former players, friends, anyone who might know anything about the Florida Gators. When the Selection was over and the crowd filed out, the players returned to the locker room and dressed for practice.
At 9 p.m. the first odds were posted online. Florida was a 26-point favorite.
During the night, an ice storm swept through and paralyzed most of the state. At daybreak, the campus, as well as most of Durham and Raleigh, was without electricity. The airport was closed. The team’s charter jet was stranded in Philadelphia. One option was to hop on a rented bus and head to Ohio, but the roads were treacherous for at least the first hundred miles, and no one was really that excited about spending the day on a bus. The gym was cold and dark; practice was out of the question. Coach Britt paced around his house, draped in a blanket, waiting on cell service, waiting on electricity and heat, waiting for the damned ice to melt so he could get his team out of town. He almost cried when he glanced outside and saw snow falling on his patio.
Around 1 p.m., the Raleigh-Durham airport opened with limited service. There was still no electricity in the area and computers weren’t online. Some cell service returned around three.
Just after four, the entire metro area blacked out again as power was lost.
At 8 a.m. Tuesday, game day, a charter bus left The Nest with ten players, four coaches, four team managers, the AD, two women on his staff, the sports information director, the director of basketball operations, a trainer, the team doctor, a strength coach, and a volunteer chaplain. For two hours, the driver inched along with the traffic on Interstate 40 until Raleigh was behind them. In Winston-Salem he turned north on I-77 and confronted more ice and slow traffic. Coach Britt, as well as the other three coaches and half the players, tracked their progress with a cell phone app using GPS. Barring any more bad luck, they should reach Dayton at 6 p.m. Tip-off was at eight.
Lonnie was certain that, in the colorful history of March Madness, no team had ever been so ill-prepared. He stayed on his phone, calling friends in the business who might be able to pass along even the slightest insight into the Florida players and coaches. His assistants did the same. The AD, after reporting the team’s travel progress to a contact person with the NCAA, and lodging another complaint about getting such a raw deal, called the AD at Florida and discussed the possibility of delaying the game for an hour. The players needed to stretch, unwind, shoot a few, grab something to eat. The Florida AD agreed, but the NCAA said no. There was a contract with CBS.
The Gators had zipped into Dayton by charter jet Monday afternoon and enjoyed a nice practice. They had returned to the court midday Tuesday for a leisurely shootaround.
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